Massive Bluehost outage affects thousands of sites

Bluehost is down. The web hosting company started experiencing technical problems last night, following some botched maintenance. Thousands of sites are down with it and Twitter is ablaze with bloggers from all corners of the world moaning about the outage and threatening to dump Bluehost for good.

This is not the only issue irking customers. Despite the fact that the outage has been going on for hours, the company is struggling to communicate with hordes of dissatisfied clients. More than seven hours ago Bluehost tweeted that there was an “unexpected issue” while performing maintenance, promising to fix the problem. The issue has not been resolved and Bluehost is stuck repeating the exact same things for hours, quickly turning into the joke of the day on Twitter.

Hundreds of new tweets are appearing by the minute and customers are poking fun at Bluehost’s PR damage control team, which keeps repeating that the “issue” is being resolved, that a “solution is being implemented” and that the sites will be back up momentarily. We looked up momentarily in the dictionary, and we’re not sure Bluehost spinners know what it means.

The direct cost of the outage is huge. With thousands of clients complaining about lost revenue, it is safe to assume that millions are lost by the hour. Even when the “issue”, which is a euphemism for “cock-up of epic proportions” is resolved, there will be hell to pay. The damage to Bluehost’s already shaken reputation will be a lot harder to fix.

This is also why our companion site Sod the Net is down, along with dozens of small niche tech sites we follow off and on. Otherwise we wouldn’t even care. Good thing bloggers are nice people, because they are starting to sound like a mob with pitchforks.